Body Talk

On touch, consent, and making bodies with our bodies.

Hello lovelies. It’s been over a year since I set-up this circus, and I’m not going anywhere, but I have decided it’s time to give my name, The Inclusive Educator, the old heave ho. I really did think this newsletter was going to be about inclusive education. But, as some of you have been politely pointing out to me, it has turned into something else. I have been brainstorming new titles for some time now, and I even thought about polling you all, but then I thought, “I could really think about this forever” and “perfect is the enemy of good” and when there is only one set of footprints in the sand, it’s because Jesus was like, ‘Sarah, until you can move on from debating newsletter titles every goddamn second, I’m gonna peace out and check out the sale at the Gap.’

As of next week, we will henceforth be known as Momspreading. Let’s take up space, get a little weird, create connections, and let the absurdities and vulnerabilities of parenting make whatever mess they’re gonna make. The content wont change, and I’m hoping it wont effect you much, but if you don’t see something from me next week, hunt around in your spam for the new address.

If you love the new title, let me know! If you don’t, do that thing we all do when a friend names their child something we never would - suck it up and say “I can’t wait to meet you, Ottoman!”

xoxo and thanks for being my ride or dies. - Sarah

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I was taking a bath with my five-year-old son the other night, when he asked me a question. What is the German word for the feeling you get when your child asks you something that you are not in any way prepared to answer? You know, like, “but mama, how did dada’s sperm get to your egg??” or “will you love me even when you’re a ghost?” or “will the police shoot me even though I have light skin?” Is it iwasnotcutoutforthisenstein? Goaskyourdadenspaken? Looktheresababydragon-iguessdragonsarerealwhatwerewetalkingaboutagainfraude? Whatever it is (to the linguists out there, feel free to chime in), I had it bad when my growing child, heading to Kindergarten but still, thank you very much, my baby, asked me why I wouldn’t pretty, pretty please, touch his tiny testicles.

Apparently, he explained, they are very smooth, and he likes them very much, and why wouldn’t I want to share in something so beautiful? We were bathing together, weren’t we? I let him play the game where he docks a boat full of cats on my boob and then realizes it’s not an island, but a sea monster, hadn’t I? Why was I drawing the line at this?

When I was growing up, our bodies were not always so distinct from one another. I shared a room with my brother until I was 12, and I don’t remember then, or frankly, now, any shyness with my body. While other kids played tee-ball, the two of us played “the bra and underwear pals,” wherein we stripped down naked, donned our mother’s lingerie and romped around the house with our arms around one another singing that refrain. At our dad’s house, the bathroom didn’t always have a door on it; at our mom’s it was shared with up to seven people at a time, with a rotating cast of special guests. I peed while my brothers showered, walked into my parents’ rooms without asking, hung around in a towel for hours as a teenager, without giving it a second thought. Now, when I tell my husband that, for an anniversary present, I am going to try to close the door when I go to the bathroom, he asks “you mean, just for the day???” When it is hot I walk around the house in my underwear, with no regard for the open windows. And when my son asks if I will take a bath with him, I do, hoping each time that it is not the last. I mostly feel fine about all this, and believe that comfort with your body and the bodies of others is different from, and perhaps antithetical to, confusion around consent.

cute? creepy? this is as divisive as that black or green dress that almost broke the internet 1,000 years ago

I am not the only mother who feels iwasnotcutoutforthisenstein from time to time, especially around sons. One friend’s son asked if he could wipe her after she went pee. Another, upon the arrival of his younger brother, begged his mother to nurse him, as well. Some of us come up with a line about how our bodies are our own, about how you should never do something that feels uncomfortable. Some of us shrug and say '“sure, whatever.” Some of the answers to these questions are very clear. But when do I have to start wearing actual pajamas instead of just my underwear? When will I have to say no to a bath together, and why does the idea that I can do these things longer with my daughter, simply because she was born with a vagina, feel both completely acceptable and totally arbitrary?

There is a nice little article on kids and consent on Fatherly.com (after you read it, the website will kindly insist that you explore How Often You Should Poop, According to Science). These dudes suggest that we model respectful boundaries by not touching (tickling, hugging, kissing) our kids when they say they don’t like it (of course, yes), and also that we ask permission before we touch them (okay, but every time we want to hug them??). Like much parenting advice, I think this is a reasonable idea, but I’m not sure we really have evidence that kids think that way about hugging their own parents, or that talking about consent, which I do think it essential, needs to be done that literally to be effective.

My partner and I talk with our kids, as all the cool parents do, about consent. Who can touch your privates (doctors and parents, though under what circumstances I have trouble articulating), listening when someone says they don’t like something, knowing it it your body and you are in charge. My kids use this against me, naturally, by insisting, if I want them to wash their hair or put on sunscreen or take one small sip of water because it is 100 degrees out and they look like they might pass out, that is it “my body!!” and I can’t make them.

I do believe all of this is very, very important. In her piece, “I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want,” the writer Melissa Febos chronicles the many moments that she has allowed others to use her body, the confusion and devastation of not being able to separate other people’s wishes for your body from your own. I had to sit in a very long silence after finishing Febos’ essay, because it was beautifully written and brutally honest and also because I recognized so much of myself in her stories. I don’t think we can truly draw a straight line between what we, as parents, say and do, and what our children internalize, but I very much want my children to have different experiences than I had. Messages of consent are worth coming back to, again and again, in the hopes that they will counteract whatever cultural influences and intra-personal differences are also dipping their hands into our children’s consciousness.

But, there’s this other thing, and it is this: In the core of my body, there is some part of me that is convinced that my children’s bodies are not, in fact, theirs. They are mine.

My friend, who has a newborn, whom she left for the longest chunk of time yet to do a short hike with me, remarked on how intertwined her body still feels with his. Since she is breastfeeding, her child needs something from her body many times a day, sometimes unpredictably. Sure, he isn’t on the inside anymore, but it feels like a continuation of the same pact. We wondered whether parents who didn’t carry their children in their uteruses, or nurse them, felt this way too. I, for one, do not want to hoard all of the boundarylessness for myself, just because I carried and nursed mine, and I would love to know how these themes come up for other parents. And, I haven’t heard my partner, a very involved father from day one, express this feeling.

When my partner asked me once about having a third child, I told him I would do it as long as he would be its mother. I wasn’t referring to the pregnancy or birth part; that I would, bizarrely enough, happily do again. Rather, it’s the feeling of your child being an extension of your physical presence, a phantom limb of sorts that you never stop longing to reattach, which I don’t think I can handle for a third go-round.

One of my greatest delights at the moment, other than playoffs basketball and something my family calls “mouth sundaes,” is pretending to gobble up my three-year-old daughter’s bountiful behind. I am a bear looking for honey or a medieval feaster mistaking it for a turkey leg or simply a mother snacking on her child’s flesh. She loves it. I know someone somewhere thinks I am not supposed to do this, or that I am supposed to ask her if it’s okay before proceeding to munch on her butt cheeks, though that would ruin the surprise. But I cannot get it through my head that we are separate, that this act is any different from brushing out the tangles in my own hair, that if I gobble hard enough I wont just suck her back into me where she belongs, forever. There is nothing in the Fatherly article about whether or not you should gobble your child’s butt. But I think I know where they stand.

There is a Pixar short-film called Bao, which my son is super into, where a mother makes bao, and then one of them hops out of the steamer and comes to life, and she raises it as her child, feeding it and marking its height on a doorframe and taking it on bus rides to the park. Then, when it grows up and finds a partner and tries to leave her home, in a fit of desperation, she eats it. The first time I watched this scene, I gasped audibly.

act one

The other night, as I was heading out to a friend’s house for a beer, my son made me kiss him all over before I was allowed to leave. He told me where he wanted the kisses planted, mostly on his neck, which makes him giggle and smile with a pleasure that maybe, now that I think of it, is inappropriate. Then he asked me if he could kiss me on my cheek, on my butt (clothed), on my neck. After this unbridled exchange of kisses, he looked like he would die right there, happy as he would ever be. It is most likely that he enjoys watching and rewatching Bao because it is funny to see a pork-filled bun wear glasses and grow a goatee and ride the bus, but I would like to think it’s because some part of him, too, wants to re-attach himself to my body, to feel my hands rolling out the dough of him, to leap into the back of my throat.

For those of you who are being held in suspense, I did not touch my son’s balls, despite his firm insistence that we would both enjoy it. I wanted to tell him this: “Of course I’m curious to see how those little guys are doing, I grew them inside of me. I ate stupid kale and didn’t drink wine (or that much wine) and looked where I was going so I wouldn’t fall and break my ankle, which is very hard for me to do. I remember on the night you were born they were swollen and red from all of the hormones my body gave you so you could come out, and your dad knew that would happen but he was still kind of in awe. And did you know, dear, that girls are born with all of their eggs already inside them, so your sister’s future children were inside of me once too, and you were inside of Grammy, and you don’t need to concern yourself too much about all of this because your job now is to develop a sense of where your body ends and others’ begin and to never offer your body to anyone except when it feels right, which I can’t fully explain to you now, but someday it will, with someone who is not me.”

I did not say these things. It was time to get out of the bath and begin our protracted bedtime funeral march and also these things are for me to process on my own, or, thanks in advance, with you. I told him that touching his balls is for him to do, and to knock himself out, in private, if that’s what he’s into. I’m sad, in a way, that my days of touching my child with abandon are waning. But I’m so happy for him that he enjoys his body. It’s a good one.

-Speaking of bodies, this children’s book, Bodies Are Cool, just came out and it is ferkin phenomenal. It doesn’t bash kids over the head with adult-sized issues, but exposes them to a simple, important idea in a developmentally appropriate and engaging way. Just be sure to read this great piece, Things you can try to do so your kid’s not a dick about other people’s weight, as a good compliment.

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